X-Rebirth : get the bad news from here !

October 15th, 2011, 20:59

Way to spread the disinformation Tragos. Luckily, we can get some truth easily enough over on Egosoft's forum. They have a whole series of sticky posts in the Rebirth forum. There you will find the entire paragraph Tragos is quoting:

One of the big changes in X Rebirth when compared to the old X games is that you as a player will only be flying a single ship. But before you get upset and complain about the lack of freedom to steer other ships, WAIT… that's still possible. Its just packaged in a different way… So please be patient for a moment and read on.

Can you say "quoting out of context" boys and girls?

Yes, you will fly only one ship. DIRECTLY. You will be able to remotely guide several kinds of drones, however. So what's the difference between flying a ship directly and flying it remotely? When a remote ship gets blown away you don't get a 'game over' in your face, you just lose contact.

This also opens up a lot of avenues for the ship you are actually sitting in. You'll be hiring a crew for it now and you'll get a copilot to fly it. (A female co-pilot! I hope she has green eyes. Lots and lots of green eyes. )

The crew thing goes beyond your own ship. Factories will be run by one of your employees. Capital ships (which you can't remotely fly) will be run by crews, too, according to your orders.

They are also getting into the modular thing. When you build a factory you aren't just buying a ready made factory from a starbase now, you buy modules and have the factory constructed from them. I think you also get to pick modules for the capital ships, too. The end result being that there will be MORE types of ships and factories, not less.

Then there's the technology end. The X series has recently suffered because it is single threaded even though the game's design really needs multiple CPUs. They couldn't do anything about it, though, because the engine was terribly old. Now they've re-written the entire engine, making many more things possible.

If my quoting is out of contex can you explain all the bitching in Egosoft's forums ?
Capital ships will be controlled like wingmen in Freespace 2 , the idea behind X games was that you can fly everything you see , this isn't the case in the new one.

On the one hand I have confidence that they're an amazing development house and will make a great game.. on the other hand, I don't see anybody making X-alikes of even close to the same quality to keep what amounts to a genre in itself evolving.

On the Steam front, I have an unstable internet connection and it's slow at the best of times meaning that it can be days sometimes between purchasing a game and getting it installed only to find out there's another 100, 200 or evena gb or so of patches before i can actually play it. Not to mention bugs like with my Shogun install where it screwed up a patch download twice and forced me thus to redownload and install at an average of 25kb/s. Or stupid features like not installing from dvd by default should you have them.

Or hell, not being able to play your paid for game while a download is in progress. Sure, it's convenient for those for whom it's convenient for - you won't catch people who can't use it talking about it much on fora 'cause their internet access is restricted, no forum, no game, no moany. Steam and pixel shaders are like Thatcher and her lost generation.